Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason Performance Evaluation

Introduction:

Cryostasis is a single player First Person Survival Horror game developed by Action Forms using the AtmosFear 2.0 engine. Cryostasis was first brought to the US as a tech demo late in 2008, and was released in the US on April 20th 2009; it was released in Russia in December 2008. Cryostasis was developed for DirectX 10, and makes use of Nvidia's PhysX technology to simulate cloth, wind effects, and most of all, water. Cryostasis uses smoothed particle hydrodynamics to simulate the water effects and visuals encompassing water flow, collisions, and pooling. The water effects are what make the visuals in this game so lifelike. You play the game as Alexander Nesterov, a meteorologist leaving Polar Ice Station 21 looking for his nice warm ride home, when he finds the polar icebreaker Northwind. The year is 1981, and the Northwind has suffered a terrible fate and is locked in the unrelenting polar ice cap. Once you enter the vessel, you are faced with surviving the ship and its inhabitants to find out the reason for its current circumstance. You will witness the last fatal moments of the crew through mental echoes and brief sequences detailing the events that led to the demise of the Northwind. Your job is to solve the riddle of the Northwind, and if you are up to it, bring the ship and crew back to life.

Since Cryostasis is a game that is best played with Nvidia cards, it looks like it is optimized to take advantage of the parallel computing powers of the Nvidia GPU. How optimized, I will find out. To test out Cryostasis, I will run six video cards through the game - four from Nvidia (GTX 295, GTX 285, GTX 275, and GTX 260 216SP), and two from ATI (HD 4870x2 and HD 4890), to see what kind of performance you'll get using the best available from either manufacturer.